You're confusing a personal and moral decision with an economic one.

A company, the legal entity, is not a person (despite what some people say) and it can't make any moral decisions. For a company the decision between "collaborate" and "stop existing" isn't murky nor is it a hard one. Corporations exist to continue operating and to continue making money. They are machines built to do that one thing.

Now the people who run the company, are different. They are humans and they are capable of making moral decisions.

BMW is also an interesting example because they didn't really make cars before hand. They made one model which was more or less of a failure until they were nationalized by the Nazi party to make aircraft engines and other vehicles. So the people who owned it did decide to jump ship when the company was taken over.

i mean i agree, and i'm not saying that the owner family should be absolved for supporting the nazis, but companies are not people and in a capitalist world, especially in a country where "useless eaters" are vilified like in nazi germany, shutting down and thereby putting hundreds of thousands of workers out of a job would have huge consequences for the own population no matter the allegiance of a particular company.

however, it is also true that bmw in particular was very happy to collaborate and employed actual slave labor from concentration camps so that point is eroded somewhat...